{"id":3115,"date":"2020-12-14T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=3115"},"modified":"2021-01-26T17:40:27","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T23:40:27","slug":"we-all-hate-to-wait-research-explains-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2020\/12\/14\/we-all-hate-to-wait-research-explains-why\/","title":{"rendered":"We All Hate to Wait; Research Explains Why"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image: A group of people wait in line, it’s raining. Image via Lars Plougmann<\/a>, CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At this very moment, as you read this, you are waiting on something. We all are waiting on something, always. As anthropologist Ghassan Hage wrote, we wait for “an ice cream and for final judgment.” The coronavirus pandemic has illuminated waiting. We waited to hear guidelines from government and health officials. We waited for our stimulus checks. And, now, we wait for our turn to get a vaccination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A difficult part of waiting is that we often do not know how long we will wait. For example, how long will we wait for a coronavirus vaccine? Research has found the importance of temporal specificity, meaning the presence or absence of a deadline as an assurance of action. A specific timeframe, telling a person when the waiting will end, gives \u201csome degree of control over the situation, through knowledge\u201d (Rotter, 2016).<\/h5>\n\n\n\n